[1"z Page 1 August Newsletter NZ Amiga Users Group (Wgtn), c/o Tony Wills, 156-C Queens Drive, Lyall Bay, Wellington 3, New Zealand. Ph (04)877-258 (home) (04)850-559x8743 (work) Editorial : Well no one sent in details of BBS systems so I guess that no one out there is interested, but just in case they are here are some BBS's around New Zealand. The only ones I have verified are those in Wellington (can't afford to ring every BBS in NZ). So if you know any of the details are incorrect, please let me know. If you decide to try some of these numbers, don't wait until 11:30pm to ring them, try them between 5:30 and 9:00pm, so that if the numbers have changed, you won't be getting someone out of bed! LIST OF NEW ZEALAND BULLETIN BOARDS 27 August 1987 Wellington BBS systems : Wellington 836-592 24 Hour Sysop - Peter Cowley Microcomputing Cost - $30 a year to join club Society Speed - 300,1200/75,75/1200 baud Machine - PC-XT 20Meg clone Software - Fido Murray's 697-432 5:45 pm- Sysop - Muzz Trickett Computer 9:00 am Cost - Free Village 9:00 pm Thr- Speed - 300,1200/75,75/1200 baud 9:00 am Fri. 1:00 pm Sat- 9:00 am Mon. Love Over Gold 278-595 6:00 pm- Sysops - Jeremy Scrivener and Maidstone  9:00 am Stephen Jones Computer Village 9:30 pm Fri- Cost - Free 9:00 am Sat. Speed -300,1200/75,75/1200 baud 12:30pm Sat- 9:00am Mon. Dumboard 277-601 5:00 pm- Sysop - Kevin Sartorelli 8:00 am Cost - Free All weekend Speed - 300,1200/75,75/1200 baud Freeboard 849-715 6:00 pm- Sysop - Peter Tse 7:00 am Speed - 300 baud The Alamo 770-129 24 Hour Sysop - Axe Man Speed - 300 baud Page 2 August Newsletter ************************************************************************** OTHER AREAS Kapicom (058)36363 8:00 pm- Sysop - Harry (Paraparaumu) 10:00 pm Cost - Free Speed - 300 Machine - C64 Harry the Sysop will answer and put you on-line. DO NOT phone in the middle of the night, or you will get an irate Sysop! NAPIER COMPUTER 070-57510 5:30 pm- Sysop - VILLAGE BBS NAPIER 8:30 am Speed - 300 baud 6:15 pm Fri- 8:30 am Sat. 12:30 pm Sat- 8:30 Mon. The Kiwifruit (075)81-333 5:30 pm- Sysop - Dennis Brown & Sel Orme Coast Bulletin 7:30 am Voice - (075) 81-333 Board (RBBS-PC) ************************************************************************** CHRISTCHURCH (03) prefix PolyVox 791-917 9:00 pm- Sysop - 7:30am Speed - 300,1200 baud 1:00 pm Sat- 7:30am Mon. Quantumnet 65-072 5:30 pm- Sysop - 8:00 am Speed - 300,1200 baud 1:30 pm Sat- 8:00am Mon. Quantumnet 69-602 24 Hour Sysop - Speed - 300,1200 baud Commodore & 61-399 5:30 pm- Sysop - Computers 8:00 am Speed - 300 baud 1:30 pm Sat- 8:00 am Mon. CCUG BBS 843-634 5:30 pm- Sysop - 8:00 am. Speed - 300 baud All weekend Greg Brackleys 890-949 10:00 pm- Sysop - Greg Brackley (RBBS-PC) 7:00 am, Speed - 300 baud 8:00 am- 5:00 pm Weekends : 10pm-9am Page 3 August Newsletter ************************************************************************** AUCKLAND BBS's (09) prefix COMPUBOARD 885-158 24 Hours Sysop's - John Blaikie, RBBS 885-159 Darrin Clement Cost - $30 Speed - up to 2400 baud BULLET 788-873 5:30 pm- Sysop - David Morland 8:00 am  Speed - 300 baud All weekend CARINA 817-6482 24 Hour Sysop - Hamish Steiner Cost - Free NZMICRO Fido 644-068 24 Hour Cost - NZMCS membership. Speed - 300, 1200/75 baud AAN 763-122 24 Hour A system being run by Kerry Hart and Andy Bearsley. RUBOARD 410-3417 5:00 pm- Sysop - Kristian Spurling 8:00 am Cost - Free All Weekend Speed - 300 baud ABUG  534-8414 24 Hour Sysop - Paul White Cost - see Chat!!! Speed - 300, 1200/75 baud (7,e,1) Access 814-9496 24 Hour Sysop - Douglas Henderson Cost - see Chat!!! Speed - 300 Chat 817-6482 24 Hour Sysop - Hamish Steiner Cost - all (3) cost $20 to join Speed - 300 Pacific 578-703 24 Hour Sysop - Computers Cost - Free  Speed - 2400,1200,1200/75,300 baud News : Commodore NZ have launched an advertising campaign to push the Amiga 500, their adverts cover most of the features of the Amiga, but they didn't really get across what a wonderful machine the Amiga really is. Page 4 August Newsletter Letters to the Editor : I am told by John Veldthuis (Taranaki), that the 'Amigan Apprentice and Journeyman Magazine' is available through D.R Britton Limited, P.O. Box 38400, Petone. The cost is $66 including GST for 6 issues (published bi-monthly). He also supplies other Amiga magazines. John also says that he was told by Commodore (Auck) technical staff that they don't have equipment to check and realign disk drives, I hope they will therefore replace any drives that go out of alignment while still under warranty. Gary Walker (Nelson) points out that expansion board problems are not limited to power supply limitatons, apparently the PLA's (programmable Logic Arrays) that control autoconfiguring in about 10% of Amigas are very suspect. The same PLA's (ones made by Texas Instru.) are almost certainly the cause of many intermittent bootup and disk drive problems. There are 4 PLA's in the set; 2 control kickstart, and DMA startup sequencing, and 2 control the expansion bus configuring. If you have an early (especially NTSC) Amiga that has a Kickstart daughterboard, then you will probably experience difficulties at some stage with expansion. I have seen similar imformation on BBS's etc (although some reports said it was the other version of the chips, not TI's that gave problems). Anyway we expect that Commodore will replace these chips as nescessary when they are found to be causing a problem, under warranty. Gary also says : An answer to the man who has RAM to burn, and wishes to copy whole disks at a time : Get Marauder II. It does a whole disk read in one pass, and allows as many simultaneous writes as you have drives. Great for Fisk disks. It is a bit copier though, so the disks should be validated by DOS after copying. Marauder II has a verify option, so use that if you are worried. Collin Price (Wanganui) wants to know if any club members have the information and diagrams for the Amiga disk drive modification as described by Bryan Feipp {whose Bryan Feipp?}, that allows you to convert df0: to an external drive {I presume that means it allows you to boot off an external drive}. He says the parts required are 7438 Nand Gate (a couple of dollars), and a DPDT switch. Well it shouldn't be too difficult to do, just switch the select line on the drive but I don't know the specific details, does anyone? Jonathan Clarke (Napier) is (or was on the 9th Aug.) trying to sell his Amiga1000 so he could upgrade to an Amiga2000. He's selling : Amiga1000 plus disks, doc's etc, External Disk drive, Printer cable (no printer), Skyfox, and PD disks. asking about $2600. Either contact him via the Hawkes Bay group, or through me. Page 5 August Newsletter Dear Tony, In the August "Bits & Bytes", after the review of the 500 there is a list of Amiga expansion hardware including prices. What a rip-off! $1395 for an Alegra memory board with 512K (it actualy says 512megs but that must be a typo) {Now there's a thought, 512Megs of ram - just right for nice long sound digitized samples! -ed}. The PALjr is listed at $4995 for 1meg Ram 20M hard disk. Somebody must be making a nice profit on those.(if they could get any sucker to buy at those prices). {The high price and limited availablity of 1000 expansion hardware is one of the reasons that I am getting a 2000. {The price that I mentioned for the PAL-JR was for one without a hard disk, the rock bottom price you will get a PAL-JR for in NZ (with 20 Meg disk) is $3500 - Hope this didn't cause any problems. As for 'suckers', I expect they figure that if we could afford over $4000 for the Amiga1000, we will pay anything they ask. -ed} Your newsdisks are great but you state that you are supposed to boot off them. I would rather not as I would lose access to VD0: and any other expansion I may get such as a real hard disk. Why do you need to boot them? is it just for the settings in preferences (in which case you can copy DF0:DEVS/SYSTEM-CONFIGURATION TO Vd0:devs and then run preferences and select "last saved" -I can get your Kiwi pointer and your horrible colors that way) or are there other reasons? { Well of course you don't have to do anything, its only that a few disks have programs on them that require a particular environment to run in, and it's easiest to set things up in the startup-sequence. eg a case in point is the Juggler demo which wanted it's data files located on a disk called movie:, so the startup-sequence was used to assign movie: to a directory on the disk. There is always the chance you will miss something if you haven't booted off the disk, but I'll try and provide a Bootup-Sequence emulator icon, that will set things as though you had booted off the disk. The 'horrible' colours are required for some of my strange icons, but they were getting a bit monotonous so I've being varing them lately. I hope everyone examines every corner of each Newsdisk, double clicks everything in sight (whatever the icon is labled), and leaves no icon unturned! -ed} Screens: I noticed at the trade fair that some of the newer monitors (1081s) have lighter screens. I mean that they reflect more ambient light. It is very noticeable when they are switched off. (we had a power cut for over an hour at one stage, ever try to demonstate how good a computer is with no power?) If all the new ones are like this I will keep my old monitor and sell the new one when I get the 2000. {Might be worth getting a screen filter - some types cut down screen flicker as well -ed} What memory address does your starboard 2 run at Tony? My Comspec starts at 00200020 and goes to 00400000. I still don't know where the other 32 bytes have gone. {Used by Autoconfig I think -ed} That may be where details about recoverable ram disks are stored.Sorry I did not take that Amon program to the trade fair so I do not know where the 2000s memory is but I'll let you know when I get mine. (I will be starting off with 3megs) Bug report: The "Talker" word processor will crash if you try to save a text-only version of your document to Ram: or vd0: ; works ok with df0: or df1: If it had worked properly my games review column would be much longer as I would not have had to retype it. Also when Page 6 August Newsletter editting text under "flush left and right" the insertion/deletion point is actually 2 characters to the left of the cursors indicated position I hear that copies of ProWrite have reached Data Stream. I might give that a try, it can't be worse than scribble or talker can it? Well I had better save this before talker gurus again. Yours Amily Ross Deeley NewsDisk : All newsdisks are available for the cost of a blank disk ($5.00). These disks are set up to be bootable workbench disks, and may not give the desired results if viewed from CLI, or after booting from another disk. Page 7 August Newsletter Public Domain Software : Num  Dos  Title  Description . 1 Aegis Draw Demo, Executable CAD demo. 2 Aquisition DataBase Demo, Slideshow of Database program. 9 Amicus disks 1-6,8-10 Library of disks, Amazing Computing. 88 AmigaLibDisks 1-90 Library of disks, Fred Fish. AmigaLibDisks #80,#88 withdrawn  and replaced by #89,#90. Boing! {See Workbench Demos}, 1 CCC Multitasking Demo, 1 Delux Video Demo, Executable DeluxVideo videos. 1 Digiview (Australia) Slideshow, Slideshow of digitised pictures. 1 Dynamic CAD slideshow, Slideshow of CAD program. 1 EA IFF 85 Standard, Sept 19, 1986 1 FAUG Disk #ll, 5 Fractal Art 1-5, From Captain Rom etc, Titirangi. 1 Future Sound Jukebox Demo, Digitized sounds from TV progs. 1 Games (Ockersoft #3) From PD disks, A.A.U.A. 1 Hippy Art, From Captain Rom etc, Titirangi 7 ILBM Fractal Art 1-7 From Captain Rom etc, Titirangi 3 1.1 Musicraft V0.99 Demo, Executable music prog. demos 7 NZAmigaUG #1 thru 7 Newsdisks 1 PageSetter Demo, Executable desktop publishing. 1 Pic#3 (Ockersoft #22) Pic's from V.A.U.G. via A.A.U.A. Robocity {See Workbench Demos}, 1 Slide Demo, Slideshow of paint prog pic's. 1 Superbase DataBase Demo, Executable database demo. 1 True BASIC Demo Executable BASIC lang. demo 1 WB_THD/DEMO (Molecules). If any of that lot isn't freely distributable, please let us know! If you've got any contributions or requests then send us a disk. (or money to purchase a box of disks, and specifications as to their contents). Boxes of blank Nashua disks are now $50 per box, dirt cheap prices available if you want lots at once. A.A.U.A. = Australian Amiga Users Association Inc. V.A.U.G. = Victoria Amiga User Group (Canada). * = New additions this month Page 8 August Newsletter Group Meetings : Auckland: The Auckland group meetings are from 7.30pm to 10pm at the Glenfield Salvation Army Hall, 430 Glenfield Road, Glenfield Contact : Roger Manson, 22 Ellice Road, Glenfield, Auckland. ph. 444-4044. Christchurch : Amiga SIG now affiliated to CHCH CCUG. Contact : Chris Glenn ph. (03)482-595 Hawkes Bay : While the group is small meetings will be held at members homes. Meetings are held on the first Wednesday of the month at 7:30pm. Inquiries should be directed to : Mike Phillips, P.O. Box 959, Hastings, Phone (070) 89-652 Nelson : Nelson Amiga Users Group meets informally, as a subgroup of the Nelson Commodore Users Group, on the third Thursday of each month, at 7:30pm, in the Stoke Primary School In-service training rooms, Main Road, Stoke. Contact : Gary Walker, ph. Nelson 85494 (home). Taranaki : Meet on the first Monday of each month at 7:30pm. somewhere in New Plymouth. Contact : John Veldthuis, ph. Manaia 8409 Wellington :  The next local Wellington group meeting is on 31st Aug. at 7:30 in the Royal Society Building, Turnbull Street, Thorndon, Wellington and will be held in conjunction with the Wgtn Micro Society's meeting. We will have a buy/sell/swap session, so bring any computer related junk that you want to get rid of, and some money! Contact : Tony Wills, 156-C Queens Drive, Lyall Bay, Wellington 3. ph. 877-258. I don't know of user groups in other areas, but the following members ticked the 'Local user group contact' box on their subscription forms BULLS Contact Bill Anderson, ph. (0652)49-066. DUNEDIN Contact Asheley Johnston, ph. (024)881-405. HOKITIKA Contact Neil Graham, ph. Hokitika 340. PALMERSTON NORTH Contact Andrew Mercer ph. (063)82-592. WANGANUI Contact Colin Price ph. (064)45-950 Page 9 August Newsletter MEMBERSHIP APPLICATION Membership fee is $12 with a surcharge for local (Wellington) members of $8 to cover room rental for local meetings. Would 'out of town' members indicate whether they would like to be local contacts for other Amiga owners in their area. Name : _________________________________________ Address : ______________________________________ : ______________________________________ : ______________________________________ : ______________________________________ Home Phone : _________________ Work Phone : ___________________ Any areas of expertise that you can share (eg C language programmer, experienced VIP-planner {Lotus 123} user, hardware hacker etc) : :________________________________________________ :________________________________________________ Any specific areas of interest (eg Graphics/Animation, Music/Sound, Accounting/Business, Publishing/Wordprocessing etc) : :_______________________________________________ :_______________________________________________ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Annual subscription fee (for following 12 months) : $12.00 ______ Local Meeting Levy : $8.00 ______ TOTAL : ====== -------------------------------------------------------------------------- _ _ Interested in a Newsdisk |_| Local user group contact |_|. Comments : ______________________________________________________ Date ______________ Signature _________________________